UFC

Have you ever been publicly praised by your boss and heralded as “one of the classiest people on Earth!”, for choosing not to continue to savagely pummel an unconscious rival until being forcibly removed from their carcass by authorities? UFC fighter Brian Stann has, and that seems like a bad thing to me.

Now, I enjoy fighting to the ultimate as much as the next reptile brained hair covered mammal. If there is an individual with whom I have an otherwise readily resolvable difference, my first, natural and only instinct is ALWAYS to elbow it until the problem is easily wiped off of my arm joint. I also want to make sure that any ultimately fighting men that might happen to read this know that I don’t have any problem with the entirely rational and completely thought through decisions you make to continue raining uncontested blows upon the face of your opponent until you are tackled off of them. That’s your call and I think it is a completely right and handsome call of you to make, so please, ask your friends “Lefty” and “Widow Maker” to unclench and enjoy the rest of this article with the warm understanding that everything you punch had it coming and I completely support your punching it until you see fit to be forced to halt your hard wired programming of “skull liquefaction”.

I’m familiar with the ultimate fight, I’ve watched several in my day. Highlight DVDs are made entirely of muscular gentlemen wailing away at the craniums of the forcibly sleeping. It’s just a little weird, to me at least, to heap so much praise upon someone doing something that should really be the rule, rather than the exception.

In his fight with Alessio Sakara, Mr. Stann completely overwhelmed his opponent in the first round, putting him to painful bed with a series of elbows. It was after this that Brian did something that initially, most spectators couldn’t wholly understand. Without any out side provocation from the official who should have been leaping across the octagon at him, Brian Stann simply stopped demolishing Alessio Sakara’s brain pan.

"Guys! I'm done punching! Seriously!"

This unexpected act of humanity by fighting man Brian Stann, one of the apparent universally regarded “good guys” of the sport of hitting other people with every blunt edge of your anatomy, prompted UFC President Dana White to announce to the Twitter machine how classy a gesture not taking liberties with the defenseless husk of Alessio Sakara was.

Now, obviously I’m not suggesting that UFC needs to be toned down, it’s infinitely more controlled than it was in its infancy, I’m just saying that it shouldn’t be such a shocking show of sportsmanship for a guy to wave a lazy, neglectful referee over to show him that he should have done his job already, that the sport itself feels like it should give this guy a trophy for having even a shred of human decency.

“He’s such a good guy, you almost want to hate him.” wrote “MMA Fighting”s Ben Fowlkes, I assume while breaking kittens legs and ensuring that they healed incorrectly. “Except, he’s also the kind of good guy who will stop a fight when he sees his opponent has been knocked out.”

That shouldn’t be a thing. What he just said. There shouldn’t be a place where it should be astonishing if someone stops fighting someone who no longer possesses the ability to fight back. Rule number one in every sport played by anyone every where should be “If your opponent has the motor function of a soggy dish rag and is unresponsive to any form of visual or aural stimuli, please stop punching them until they can be officially declared dead.”

So, good fight Mr. Stann, congratulations on being a rational individual, capable of remorse and able to recognize when your fists have transitioned from sporting equipment to state’s evidence. Now might I suggest you sit down with Dana White for a dish of delicious frozen yogurt and explain to him why being so excited about one of his employees choosing of his own accord to be a human being shouldn’t be so god damned tweet worthy.

(1) Amon, the Egyptian Cobra was once a security guard at a shoe store. He got the part time job guarding really expensive sandals in an elite shoe store after he was laid off during the dot com bust in 2002. “I wasn’t sure what to do after I lost my job as a graphic designer, but a friend told me about how I could bite people who tried to steal shoes, so I said ‘what the heck’.”

$120,000 sandals? Do you have these in my size?

(2) He was mistakenly captured while taking a jog through Central Park in New York after another jogger reported him as a felon they saw on America’s Most Wanted. “One minute I was taking an early morning jog, and the next minute I’m in some burlap sack in the back of a truck on my way to the zoo.”

(3) Amon was forced to delete his Match.com profile after being accused of spitting on one of the other members when out on a date. “I don’t know what this crazy bitch is talking about! I didn’t even go out with her, but I do have a cousin who’s a Red Spitting Cobra that she may have gone out with. People always say ‘they all look alike’, I say you’re all racist!”

I like jogging, Broadway shows, and good conversation

(4) He was the model for the 2010 Ford Cobra. “I sent Ford my zed-card and I surprisingly got a call from them about a week later. They loved my look and booked me for the job three days later. I was really honored because there were probably eight other guys there who I thought were much better looking than me. Oh well, who’s the badass cobra now?”

(5) Amon has a real passion for MMA and is working his way up for a chance to fight in the UFC. He has an impressive 8-1 record as an amateur with all his wins coming by submission. He has

That belt is MINE!

also been chosen for the next season of The Ultimate Fighter. “I love love love Jiu-Jitsu and have a real gift with submissions. I just wanna get in the octagon and be the next middleweight champ by beating Anderson ‘The Spider’ Silva. I want a really cool nickname too, like ‘The Killer’ or ‘Punishment’.” We think “The Cobra” would be cool, but who are we to say anything?

(1) Amon, the Egyptian Cobra was once a security guard at a shoe store. He got the part time job guarding really expensive sandals in an elite shoe store after he was laid off during the dot com bust in 2002. “I wasn’t sure what to do after I lost my job as a graphic designer, but a friend told me about how I could bite people who tried to steal shoes, so I said ‘what the heck’.”

$120,000 sandals? Do you have these in my size?

(2) He was mistakenly captured while taking a jog through Central Park in New York after another jogger reported him as a felon they saw on America’s Most Wanted. “One minute I was taking an early morning jog, and the next minute I’m in some burlap sack in the back of a truck on my way to the zoo.”

(3) Amon was forced to delete his Match.com profile after being accused of spitting on one of the other members when out on a date. “I don’t know what this crazy bitch is talking about! I didn’t even go out with her, but I do have a cousin who’s a Red Spitting Cobra that she may have gone out with. People always say ‘they all look alike’, I say you’re all racist!”

I like jogging, Broadway shows, and good conversation

(4) He was the model for the 2010 Ford Cobra. “I sent Ford my zed-card and I surprisingly got a call from them about a week later. They loved my look and booked me for the job three days later. I was really honored because there were probably eight other guys there who I thought were much better looking than me. Oh well, who’s the badass cobra now?”

(5) Amon has a real passion for MMA and is working his way up for a chance to fight in the UFC. He has an impressive 8-1 record as an amateur with all his wins coming by submission. He has

That belt is MINE!

also been chosen for the next season of The Ultimate Fighter. “I love love love Jiu-Jitsu and have a real gift with submissions. I just wanna get in the octagon and be the next middleweight champ by beating Anderson ‘The Spider’ Silva. I want a really cool nickname too, like ‘The Killer’ or ‘Punishment’.” We think “The Cobra” would be cool, but who are we to say anything?

What ever happened to the good ol’ fashioned faint? Back in the Victorian era when women would actually faint so much, they had “fainting rooms”. A whole damn room with a luxurious couch just for slowly falling down on with the back of one’s hand on their forehead! That’s damn fancy! But the price of vanity was high with the much sought after “hourglass” shape and women would cram themselves into a corset that was then tightened to the point of rib cage crushing, internal organ crowding and the inability to breathe normally. Sometimes I see this in modern day life, but the corset has been replaced with black stretch pants. But I digress.

These days we just need a barstool and the ability to run up a big tab down at O’Malley’s Mad Irish Hole in the Wall. Wait, that’s passing out, and that is not to be confused with fainting, which is not to be confused with blacking out, which is not to be confused with vertigo, or spinninghead, giddiness, wobbliness and shakiness. Although they all sound EXACTLY the same, they are all different.

My Feint Makes You Faint

Now if you throw ‘feinting’ into this mix of wobbly goodness, you will be totally confused unless you see how it is spelled. Feinting is actually when you fake a move, such as in boxing or MMA when you pretend to throw a punch at one area of the body and actually hit them in another area. Now that can then also be misconstrued as pretending to be injured or dead to fake out your enemy, which then throws another spelling conundrum into the mix with the “Is it Fainting or Feinting”? There is a breed of goats that seem to have it down pat, but, are they actually fainting? Or are they “feinting”? It’s a question that only the goat will know, and goat handlers can only speculate when chasing these poor creatures around with umbrellas.

Alimony or Beer? It's all so confusing

Some people faint at the sight of blood, some when they’ve seen a ghost and others when the alimony settlement is made in court. Enter, the smelling salts. These fancy little contraptions have been around since the Roman times and are mentioned as early as 77AD in writings of Pliny the Elder, which then leads to another very strange connection with all this. Pliny the Elder is also a modern day beer made by Russian River Brewing Company. Now one would think that if you imbibed enough of Pliny the Elder, one would need the ‘sal ammoniac’ (smelling salt) that Pliny actually writes about to come out of a ‘passing out’, which is not to be confused with a fainting,

You look faint, come lie down here on my couch

but the more I read into this whole nonsense of losing one’s consciousness in whichever way one sees fit, I have no idea what any of it means anymore.

So let’s have one more Pliny the Elder in an attempt to reach the vertigo effect and cheers to corsets and to fancy couches for falling down on when one feints, or faints.

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